


Among the Springs of Fire

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Resplendence [6]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Murder, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Rape Aftermath, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-28
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2019-02-08 03:28:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12855774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: “It seems you’re a public menace, Mr Eames,” says the spritely young man with pink cheeks and one rogue cowlick above his ear.Eames adores him before he’s even opened his mouth.





	Among the Springs of Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Mild spoiler apology: I have no idea why I think Eames is a bit of a misogynist in this series. I actually really like him. So, sorry about that. 
> 
> I have no idea whatsoever if you'll understand this without the context of at LEAST the first story in this series, possibly all of them. Maybe go back and give them a go?
> 
> Please read, please review, all those great things. There is at least one more in this series to go!

 

.

.

What happens to a pair of overexerted lungs in sub-zero temperature is, Eames thinks, the most unspeakably frightening way to die.

He thinks about it a lot.

.

.

The face in his hands, stubbly to touch, invisible prickles.

The Boy with the old drunk’s eyes and the naive friendliness of a three-year-old.

Good cop, though he doesn’t know it.

“I can help,” he says, earnest. Frightened.

“Yes,” Eames says.

He’s dislocated his thumbs to get out of the manacles, his muscles are limp petals around his bones, but he’s stronger than this Boy’s skeleton.

Thirty pounds of pressure, the glancing pain of de-socketed joints.

“You can help,” Eames says.

The Boy smiles. Eames grits his teeth.

He wrenches the Boy’s skull, hooked around the jaw with the weak heel of his hand.

The Boy’s neck snaps with a crunch, like an echo in the cavern of a hot mouth, teeth biting down on ice cubes.

.

.

Eames comes into being on a Tuesday.

He comes into being after the man he was before, Jacky Novos, gets connected to a heist in Stockholm involving too many guns and not enough diamonds.

Spectacular cock up, really.

But that was years before dreaming.

Jacky Novos was a thug on his bad days and a dickhead on his good ones.

Eames is an artist, a gambler and a fence.

His first forgery, a few coins with the lion’s lines of Alexander stamped into them, gets him enough cash to rent a place in Athens for a few months.

The second, a stone bust of Medusa circa 800 BC, gets him a name in classical heritage.

He is twenty-two years old.

.

.

Before Jacky Novos, there was William Nicholls.

William Nicholls was a wily devil.

William Nicholls killed his first man when he was seventeen.

Took his first hit of cocaine when he was sixteen.

Sucked off his first trick when he was fifteen.

.

.

Jacky Novos was ashamed of William Nicholls, but Eames is rather fond of him.

Rather protective.

(Fiercely so.)

.

.

The thing is, Eames runs out of time very quickly, in the end.

The plane touches down at Kaunas Airport and they take separate cabs into the city, one hotel room.

Eames means to tell him. He really does.

But Arthur has two default settings: irate and delighted.

Irate Arthur has no time for cryptic warnings. Meanwhile, faint whispers fly so far over Delighted Arthur’s head, they may as well be skylarks, battered in the breeze.

.

.

He expects them to get him on the way out.

.

.

(But see, Death is an impatient mistress.)

.

.

Dreaming comes naturally to Eames.

It keeps childhood nightmares away. It is endless in potential. It is pure creation.

Eames is in Edinburgh the first time he hears the word PASIV.

He gets a call from Mick Tux, asking to meet for a job proposition.

He leaves his half-finished Matisse in a warehouse the following day.

.

.

Before all that, though, there was Emmeline.

Sunlight at midnight, the lullaby in a child’s ear as he gasps out of bad dreams, the shrieking of a woman who is little more than a girl.

Emmeline, her soft hands and her strong voice.

A face that people will pay to photograph.

_I’m going away, Will. But I’ll come back for you, ok?_

But she didn’t.

She never came back.

.

.

_(I am part of that part that at first was one, part of the darkness from which light has sprung.)_

.                                             

.

They bury her in the break of spring.

The funeral parlour doesn’t let the fourteen-year-old boy in to see her, because it would be  _indecent._

William sneaks in anyway. He looks at her puffy purple face, the mangled fingers of her soft hands. A chunk of her corn gold hair is missing, and they’ve tried to hide that, but he can tell.

William screams and screams and screams.

.

.

Eames thinks about the cadaver they called Emmeline for all of two seconds when Carmen Ross’ throat is slit before he can find her.

He remembers distantly William’s horror, remembers it like it’s a film he saw once when he was high; he hopes Carmen Ross doesn’t have a little brother who adores her.

Then he picks up the ragdoll corpse that once was Carmen, bundles her like a drunk party girl called Carrie to her car.

He dumps her in a swampy field where she won’t be found for at least three months. Then he remembers reading in the files that Carmen Ross owns a secret apartment in Marrakesh and he thinks,  _yes_ ,  _Ross, I’ll take care of that for you._

Arthur doesn’t approve.

He says it’s  _indecent._

But Eames likes to think that maybe something good came of Emmeline’s death, too, the way he can pull something good out of twenty-one-year-old Carmen’s ravaged throat.

Something better than his own petty descent in criminality, this time.

.

.

 _Are you happy?_ he had asked, sincere and fearful, like he couldn’t tell.

Like he really didn’t know.

.

.

His first forge is a heavy lidded, fuzzy featured man. Tall and slim, with strong hands and thin hips and a weak chin.

(Mister Ravens had been so frightening to his six-year-old self, but twenty-five year old Eames knows better.)

(Mister Ravens’ skin is ill-fitting and not just because of his saggy gut. Still, it’s a start.)

He is told by a woman called Roseanne that forging is an art for intellectuals.

For a moment his rage is absolute, but he loosens his fists because he’s learned better than to hit girls, even out of public eye.

She sneers at his tattoos and the way he spells  _consessive_ and the wrinkles in his jeans.

He loathes her.

He loathes her enough to forge her when he requires a needy slut to tease secrets out of a mark. He pretends the real Roseanne can feel it when the mark’s hands clamp tight around the column of his throat. (Of  _her_ throat.)

Roseanne teaches him a lot.

She teaches him how to spell  _concessive_ and she teaches him how to orchestrate a kick from a locked prison cell in pitch dark and she teaches him the intimacies of a woman’s body he’s only ever had the vaguest of interests in before.

As it turns out, lining the seam between his legs takes more than a tangle of hairs and damp, indistinct heat.

Roseanne takes pleasure in teaching him what it feels like to be wet and wanting while he takes pleasure in keeping his hand pressed too hard for too long against her twitching gash.

Roseanne tells him that’s not a word to use in company. It’s a tired lesson and Eames only half listens because he already knows.

But see, it’s easier to hate this woman than to accept she might know a thing or two.

(When Eames is twenty-five years old, he has been declared missing for eight years, but he is still his father’s son.)

He thinks about sending a card when he hears Roseanne has quit dreaming, when he hears  _why_ she’s quit dreaming.

He thinks the better of it.

But if one night he happens to pass by the hotel room of the bastard who took half her sight, half her sanity and most of her dignity; if he happens to have a rogue keycard and time to kill, well, who’s going to miss an animal like that?

.

.

(His PA, apparently. They’d been sleeping together for a month and a half and were madly in love.)

.

.

Arthur teaches Eames things, too.

They are quiet, intimate lessons, not the ones Arthur means to teach.

He thinks he’s teaching Eames how to spell and how to speak Italian and how to rewrite computer codes to scrub out digital footprints.

Instead, quite mistakenly, he teaches Eames how to play the biggest con of all.

(He teaches Eames how to play Eames.)

.

.

Being Eames is easy around Arthur, because it’s easy to meet Arthur’s demands.

.

.

(Not the ones he says, just the ones he wants. So, Eames doesn’t alphabetise his files and he doesn’t clean up red wine the instant it spills, but he stops drinking tequila when Arthur looks at him with disapproval and he starts painting the sunsets he sees instead of the ones others saw.)

.

.

Being Eames is easy because Arthur loves Eames and that’s the only thing the man called Eames wants half the time.

.

.

_(But a lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness.)_

.

.

Sometimes good people do bad things.

This is an easy truth to cling to in the small hours.

The truth is Eames is not good people.

He might have been in another lifetime. He might have been good and kind and brave.

In this lifetime, in  _his_ lifetime, the one that lasts thirty-four years, five months and nine days, he does bad things that no good man would ever do.

When Eames is seventeen he drops a lit match on the carpet of a house he’s broken into through the back door.

He takes a book from a shelf before he leaves.

(It’s an analysis of Francis Bacon’s career and Eames, whose name is William, then, keeps it for the rest of his life.)

Three people die in that fire, though only one deserved it.

Eames isn’t sure what a person has to do to deserve burning alive in their own bed, but it must be awful, worse even than burning someone alive in their bed.

(Worse than burning a man’s wife and child alive in their beds, too.)

.

.

‘Are you coming back?’ Eames asks, blind with hate for his own starved affection as Arthur swings his bag over his shoulder and throws the hotel key onto the desk with a hard  _clunk-clang._

‘Yes,’ Arthur says. Doesn’t look away from the door when he says it.

Eames could grow fat on all the tasty lies he’s been told in his life, but this one is sour, ferments instantly in his heart.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he murmurs.

He says it quietly, the same way he prays, disbelieving petulance, animal instinct.

Arthur’s jaw is marked with beard burn from Eames’ kisses and he flexes it, tight. His eyes are pink, but he hasn’t cried yet.

Isn’t crying now, so Eames will be damned if he gets to see Eames cry.

‘Then don’t,’ Arthur sneers, looking deep into Eames’ eyes for the first time since he leapt out of bed at Cobb’s call.

Eames is still in bed, still naked, still half-hard despite the chill perpetuating through the room.

 _Fuck Arthur_ if he thinks Eames is going to beg and chase him like a child.

Eames opens his mouth to reply.

Arthur turns on his heel and walks out of the hotel room.

.

.

They won’t see each other for three months.

.

.

(It’ll be a long three months.)

.

.

Eames puts in a good word to get Cobb quietly out of the US when it becomes clear even from halfway across the world that he’s about to get swallowed up into the chomping jaws of the justice system.

He doesn’t do it for Cobb and he doesn’t do it for Arthur.

He doesn’t do it for Mallorie, because she knew exactly what would happen if she kept playing with her chemistry set like it was nothing more than soda and coke.

He does it because there are two children who have lost their mother and visiting daddy in prison once a month isn’t going to help them become anything other than angry, selfish crooks for the rest of their lives.

.

.

(Rage is fireworks and fury is a forest fire, but anger? That’s the slow burn, the lava in the volcano that never actually cools, not for ten thousand years.)

.

.

 _I’m angry with you,_ Jeremy Bell says behind the bike sheds, years ago.

Eames doesn’t reply because his mouth is otherwise occupied, but he can’t blame Jeremy.

Getting outed in the middle of History on a Thursday in February probably hadn’t been on Jeremy’s agenda for the year.

It’s Tuesday by now and Jeremy has a busted lip that means he probably isn’t going to be interested in reciprocating, but Eames owes him.

(That is to say,  _William_ owes him.)

(William owes a lot of people already.)

.

.

The day Arthur follows Eames around London, all the way into a tavern in Southwark, Eames toys with the idea of shaking him.

Instead, he pickpockets seven people with a lazy skip in his stroll and his heart fluttering in his oesophagus.

.

.

More often than not, Eames will answer his phone when Arthur calls.

It’s a biological imperative, an evolutionary impulse.

He answers the phone because on the select occasions when Arthur doesn’t answer  _his_ phone, Eames’ stomach twists with oily anxiety.

(Eames anxiety is still a lot more moderate than Arthur’s, whatever the younger man might say.)

He doesn’t answer the phone this time, though.

He sits at a table on a white stone veranda of the nicest fish restaurant in Cadiz, staring at his phone as it growls its vibrations beside the untouched cutlery.

The message glows a minute later.

1 Voicemail

Eames slips the phone into his pocket and drains the chardonnay from his glass.

Leaves a tip that’s twice the price of the drink.

Cadiz is too small to really feel safe, as far as Eames is concerned. The locals are chatty enough and the tourists swarm out of their cruise ships by the hundreds, hordes of clicking cameras and blinking sunglasses and sandy beach towels.

The market is superb, the castle is pretty, and it all gives Eames a migraine just thinking about it.

He’s wearing grey shorts and a pink polo shirt, and he feels like an overgrown seventeen-year-old who got lost on his way to Magaluf.

His flip flops slap against the soles of his feet as he walks heavily down towards the beach,

He imagines Arthur’s irritated  _huff._

There’s a group of women staying in the hotel on the floor below him, pink bridal party sashes permanently tied to their foreheads. One of them winked at him as she poured a glass of orange juice in the dining area this morning.

He walks along the sea front and thinks about taking up her sly offer.

In his pocket the voicemail blinks, waiting.

.

.

A year and a half later, he’ll wish he’d bitten the bullet and listened to that voicemail, because maybe everything would have turned out different.

.

.

 _So, it’s true,_ Arthur says in Monaco.

When Eames punches him, he wears that guilty, confused mask that softens his sharpness and makes Eames feel hollow.

Blood drips into his crisp blue shirt and he says something else, but Eames doesn’t hear it.

The shrill pounding in Eames’ head peaked with the smack of his knuckles in Arthur’s mouth and the aftermath is chaos.

 _Yes,_ he thinks he says, hopes he says.  _Yes, it’s true, it’s all true, I think I might be dying it’s all so fucking true._

But either he says something else or nothing at all – or maybe those sun-soaked midnights were for nothing – because Arthur reaches out and grabs his forearm hard enough to bruise.

_FUCK OFF_

The words are too big for his mouth. He roars them.

(This must be what the bull feels, right before the sword plunges too deep.)

He’s burning with terror and rage. Arthur’s not wiping the blood off his face, his lovely face. It aches something fearsome to see that face contorted with hurt and hate.

 _Get the fuck away from me, Arthur,_ Eames says.

 _Get the fuck away because I’m filthy and damaged and terrified and I love you more than I did before you ditched me for a man who doesn’t even know what day your mother died or where your sister lives,_ Eames doesn’t say.

When Eames looks up, looks up from where he’s curled into the floor beneath the bay window of the hotel room, shaking like spring in February, he’s alone.

The only proof of Arthur’s brief presence is the specks of blood on Eames knuckles and the hole in his heart where hope used to reside.

.

.

 _Are you happy?_ he asks, later.

Too late for lies and too sudden for honesty.

.

.

“You are completely missing the point of being a criminal, you idiot,” Eames says.

It’s absurdity and fondness, seven years old eating chocolate for breakfast on Easter Sunday.

Rather, twenty-seven years old and drinking sangria for dinner after a job well done.

Twenty-seven years old, eyes sparkling with awe for this wondrous creature beside him.

Arthur’s suit has been exchanged for a soft cotton shirt and beige slacks. He looks rumpled, clean. He looks about twelve – but no, wait – that’s not right. He looks about sixteen.

(Eames isn’t allowed to imagine him under the table with his mouth hot and wet and open if he looks anything less.)

.

.

(Eames has been imagining this for a while, now.)

.

.

_(Give a man a mask and he will show you his true face.)_

.

.

The Arthur in his head is a crumpled pile of sheets. The Arthur in his head is grumpy, but not irate.

The Arthur in his head is bossy and a little bit smug. The Arthur in his head smells very faintly of fresh ginger and brown sugar. The Arthur in his head smiles with dimples more often than not.

In his life, Eames forges Arthur for a job eleven times.

The real Arthur knows about six of them.

The Arthur in his head approves.

.

.

(The Arthur in his head forgives him for lying as they leave the hotel in Kaunas, make their way to the warehouse. The Arthur in his head kisses him as the thunder claps its hands above them. The Arthur in his head is there, at the end.)

(The real Arthur’s there, too.)

.

.

“It seems you’re a public menace, Mr Eames,” says the spritely young man with pink cheeks and one rogue cowlick above his ear.

Eames adores him before he’s even opened his mouth.

Eames adores him the second he ducks into the tavern, bold as an oak tree.

He’d refused to be shaken off; even Old Spitalfields hadn’t been enough to cover Eames’ tracks. There’s plenty of room for bloodhounds in London. Eames has been laying down false trails for years, but this young man’s only the third to ever keep up with him in his own hunting grounds.

So, Eames sneaks into a pub, orders two whiskies and waits.

It takes less than two minutes for the kid to follow. Spaniel eager with the scowl of a pitbull.

“Can I help you darling?” Eames asks, soft and fond.

“It seems you’re a public menace, Mr Eames,” a snipped American voice replies from that young scowl.

There is only one possibility, now, and Eames feels himself preening as his grin splits his face.

“Arthur,” he announces,  _so glad to finally meet you,_ silently follows.

Arthur does not look pleased.

.

.

When they take the flat in Mombasa, the scowl returns. Eames kisses it over and over until it melts into an open mouth.

.

.

Dominick Cobb is almost certainly punching above his weight where his wife is concerned.

Eames tried to say as much to Arthur, once, only to be met with defensive, brambly retorts.

He says as much to Mal, too. Her response is far more agreeable.

Throwing back her head, laughter ringing in her throat, she smooths a hand over Eames’ head like a prized cat.

“Perhaps it’s his massive cock,” she suggests, eyes sparkling as she squeezes her legs together teasingly.

They sit outside the Marian Goodman Gallery, waiting for Dom and Arthur to finish canvassing the building.

“You’re not that shallow,” Eames disagrees with a shake of his head.

He entertains imagining her, naked and open, for all of three seconds, then looks into her glittering eyes.

“Arthur has a crush on your husband,” he says, unsure whether or not he’s joking.

Mal laughs again.

“Harmless,” she dismisses, confident the way Eames has only ever known immaculately beautiful women to be. “He doesn’t know it himself.”

Eames considers this.

He’s maintained the assumption that Arthur, baby-faced as he is, is one of the most self-aware people he’s ever known.

He thinks about their last job together; the way Arthur had quarrelled with Eames so fiercely about the mark’s susceptibility to seduction over a good old-fashioned businessman con.

His tight shirt collars and the rolled-up sleeves, the coffee he let go cold out of spite.

“I don’t have a crush on your husband,” Eames clarifies, just to hear that throaty laugh again.

Mal shakes her head and her glossy hair flicks over her shoulder.

How marvellous, this predator and prey all wrapped up in a lean, birdlike frame.

“No,” she agrees. “But you don’t entertain harmless crushes, Mr Eames.”

Eames doesn’t know how she figures this out, but it’s possibly the truest thing he’s ever heard.

“Waste of time,” he says, returning her affectionate hand-on-head stroke. “We share that, I think.”

“You are the Watcher,” Mal reminds him. “You tell me.”

Eames closes his eyes, tilting his face up, sunning himself in the weak January light.

The city smells of snow, though it’s long melted now.

“You love, or you don’t,” Eames tells her, tries not to sound too fond, doesn’t mind failing just this once.

“And I never stop,” she says quietly.

Eames smiles, but doesn’t acknowledge the confession. He doesn’t need to.

They share many things, after all.

.

.

“I think I’m a little bit in love with you,” Eames tells a pink, sea-salty smile, one that Eames wants to eat up until no-one else can claim it.

Arthur doesn’t say it back.

It doesn’t matter. He kisses Eames and that’s enough.

Eames has always found it astonishingly easy to offer unreciprocated love.

.

.

(And in any case, Eames doesn’t think it’s unreciprocated, not for a second.)

.

.

In a restaurant bathroom, Arthur jams his hand down Eames’ pants with such force, for a split second he thinks he’s going to do serious damage.

His hands are very rough, one down his boxers and one up his shirt.

Eames wriggles his fingers down Arthur’s trousers blindly, the back of his head bruising against the toilet cubicle door. He mutters a long string of curses into Arthur’s neck while the American breathes heavily in his ear.

When it’s over, Eames surprises himself by leaving first. He washes his hands silently, hot and soap and cold.

Surprises them both, he thinks, by the frosty way Arthur refers to him for the rest of the job.

.

.

_(No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.)_

.

.

The Boy pins his left shoulder down, the first time. His fingernails are sharp.

He’s a wiry little fuck.

The next time Eames sees him is after Moran let loose his screaming rage, jammed his pistol far enough to test his prisoner’s gag reflex, left him in the dark with a syringeful of opiates in his arm.

The Boy comes bearing a thin bowl of water and two wet slices of bread.

Eames blinks up at him, chained to the wall. The Boy’s hair looks grey in the medieval torchlight, his bones too big for his skin.

His eyelids are fat, his ears are lopsided. His nose is very long.

He looks about eighty that second time.

The third time, he looks thirteen.

Eventually, he tells Eames he is nineteen.

(The eighth time, he tells Eames he is nineteen.)

He brings Eames very salty fish, once. The drugs dull the taste and it stings his split lips.

Eames is  _very grateful, Boy._

“Rutt,” the Boy says, which is a very bad fake name, but Eames doesn’t explain why.

“Pleasure,” he says instead, wobbling a hand where it’s bound behind his back.

“Frankie is buying stock from Dubai,” Rutt tells him, his lids heavy over glassy, fearful eyes.

It’s very dark in this dungeon.

Eames’ Russian is passable at best.

Rutt’s English is very good.

“He’s going to extract from you. Once he has a new machine.”

Rutt says it firmly, coolly. Cassandra’s confidence in his low tone.

The next day, Eames smashes his forehead into Moran’s nose.

The punishment, which is as humiliating as it is excruciating, lasts for days.

Rutt’s there, afterwards. If he took a ride while Eames was too out of it to notice, he does a good job lying about it after.

Although, Eames thinks Rutt is probably a virgin.

When the time comes, it’s the only thing that gives him pause.

He snaps the Boy’s neck anyway, of course.

.

.

“Eames, it’s ok,” Arthur will say, when he tells him, five hundred and ninety-two days later.

“I know it is,” Eames will say, charcoal on his fingers and a bottle of cough syrup in his back pocket. “Still shit though.”

.

.

Rutt hits the ground very hard, dead body hard. Slab of meat on the wet concrete of the abattoir.

Eames thinks, very briefly, of the Bacon forgery he did in Paris, the cloven meat, the smudged face.

He staggers to his feet. With unsteady balance he grabs the key where it’s fallen and the slick knife from the Boy’s boot.

He burns his prison to the ground with paraffin and a liquid lighter.

His feet are crammed into stolen boots that sink heavily into the snow.

He ruins for almost a mile, throws up twice on the way.

All the while, blood pounds through his lungs, threatening to burst.

The stolen phone has GPS.

It’s the only thing that saves him.

.

.

 _What can I do?_ he asks, like he hasn’t done everything.

.

.

Grief can bring out the best in a person. It can evoke compassion and affection and genuine need to care.

It can also bring out the worst.

Because grief, it is inherently selfish. It’s a biting, necessary selfishness. A sadness that says  _I am sad_ without trying not to.

When he is fourteen, William Nicholls learns he is the worst kind of griever. His hostility explodes out of him again and again like solar flares.

In a fit of terrible fury, he shreds one of Emmeline’s dresses. The satin lilac one she wore as a bridesmaid to Auntie Tess’ wedding.

He keeps the tattered rags in his wardrobe.

Hoards them like a skeleton.

Jacky Novos doesn’t grieve about anything more than a pint that gets knocked over on a busy bar.

Eames grieves a few times.

He doesn’t rip up any more dresses. Nevertheless, he’s still not a compassionate mourner.

He despairs Mal’s passing for the things it costs him.

He thinks to himself, if he were to lose Arthur, really lose him, he’d probably lose his mind.

.

.

_Mr Eames?_

Speaking.

_This is a courtesy call. You saved my daughter’s life._

Did I?

_A man came to my shop today. Asking about you. I told him you were in Cairo._

Did this man has a name?

_Lindon._

I see.

_I think he wants to kill you._

So do I. Thanks, pet.

_You saved my daughter’s life._

No. Not really. I appreciate it, though.

.

.

“I have a favour to ask,” Eames says after draining his third scotch.

Saito raises his eyebrows. He’s immaculate as ever in his suit, and even Eames has dressed himself a little nicer than usual. New York doesn’t rank in Eames’ list of favourites, but he knows how to get the most out of it when he’s there.

The bar is on a rooftop, sheltered by large palm trees. It offers a lot of cocktails and normally Eames would buy the most outrageous one, but it isn’t as much fun when Arthur isn't there to roll his eyes.

“I don’t do favours,” Saito reminds him.

There’s no heat to it. He sips his own poison of choice, also his third, and pushes aside the papers they’d been going over together. There’s little more to discuss, anyway.

He wouldn’t have flown halfway across the world to catch Eames between jobs if he didn’t trust him to get it done.

“I’m a professional liar,” Eames reminds him in return.

“What do you need?”

Eames pulls a phone out of his jacket pocket, pulls up a grainy image and hands it to Saito, who looks at it impassively.

Eames waits a few moments before speaking.

“His name is Lindon. He tailed me through three states before I dumped his body in the Raritan River. I don’t know who he works for and I’m interested.”

Saito flicks the phone into his own pocket.

“I don’t do favours,” is all Saito says before waving to a waiter and ordering a fresh round.

.

.

Lilija, the slack-mouthed, bright-eyed maid with the soft mouse hair tied up in an iron bun, cleans the room where the two men stayed.

They didn’t check out, but when she goes into the room it’s empty. Pre-paid for, no skin off the hotel’s nose.

Kaunas isn’t busy, this time of year.

She roots routinely through the desk and bedside drawers, finds a sheet of paper folded once, covered in trim handwriting, tucked inside a spiral notebook.

.

.

_A,_

_If you’re reading this either I am dead or I forgot to remove it when we got back._

_If it’s the latter, stop reading now, I’m a twat._

_If it’s the former, sorry._

_It’s not your fault. Never think it’s your fault, even for a second. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’ve never known how to tell you things. I just expect you to know them._

_Like Monaco. Which I have always regretted._

_Mal told me she never stops loving. Neither do I._

_I won’t see you again. Don’t you dare see me again._

_Yours._

_E_

.

.

Only once, Eames tries out the third level alone.

The new architect is eager and curious. She’ll be the best in the world by Christmas or dead within a year, Eames thinks.

Maybe both.

 _Ariadne,_ like the myth. Not his favourite story, or even his favourite period of European history. He knows it well all the same.

“I added the second strip on the North ridge, like you suggested,” she says as she hands Eames the IV.

She hovers at Yusuf’s shoulder like a monarch butterfly, halfway to California. Exhausted, ready.

“I’ll have a look,” is all Eames can manage.

He’s always found women under the age of thirty-five quite tiresome.

Yusuf gives him a look that he grimaces at. Ariadne seems unperturbed, probably because she’s already used to Dominick’s strained barbs.

Prickled by the thought she has been likening him to Cobb all this time., Eames throws her a small, one-sided smile.

She scrunches her eyes in a nervous half return.

His feet slam into snow before he can register the sting of the needle.

He’s distracted by the memory of her nervous energy and he pays for it., because he isn’t wearing a snowsuit.

It’s irritating but not unfixable. The bite of winter has its jaws around his navel where he stands in his corduroys and shirt.

He looks to his left and sees a pile of thick mountain gear, which he slings on easily, does up his boots with numb fingers before tugging on his gloves.

Then he sets off across the slope in search of his shortcut.

Eames doesn’t dream by himself often. He enjoys the thrill of creation, but it’s a lonely thing without somebody to impress. Narcissism runs hot through his bloodstream, always has.

His subconscious has never been a kind place, not even to himself. It’s been months since he’s gone down alone, because there are animals in a cage somewhere in his thoughts. They’ve been gnashing their teeth every night for almost a year, untrained circus animals with powerful jaws and carnivore rage.

He trudges through snow that’s knee deep and vicious. It takes twenty minutes just to reach the clearing.

The slope gets steep from here, too steep for racing. It’s been a long time since he’s gone skiing.

“Fuck you,” he says to nobody in particular, staring hard through the blue-grey air at a pair of skis propped up against a heavy conifer.

It takes forever to strap himself into them. His hands fumble, first clumsy in the gloves, then too cold to move without them.

He curses a lot, haphazard shapes of insults that have been resting in his mouth like mints for days.

For almost two hours, he practices the route to the hospital. The acceleration swoops through his belly every time. It’s almost too fast to be enjoyable, but the chafing of the wind over his face, so thin it breaks the skin and bleeds in tiny rivulets, calms him down until the anger is cut into avenues he can direct, like bullet lines through the air.

By the time he can do it with his eyes closed, quite literally, his bones are jelly, his joints chalk. He unclips himself from his skis and enters the hospital building, laboured movements, a crow on the ground.

“Fucking hate the cold,” he reminds nobody as he slumps to the ground.

Sharp tears well up in his eyes and it’s easy to blame the exhaustion, even when his chest shakes.

Working with Arthur has never been  _easy,_ per say. He’s exacting and obsessive and every time his standards are met he raises the bar, making basic contentment such an unreachable goal it may as well be the gates of heaven.

This is different, though. It’s the first time since Monaco and it hurts more than he expected, because Arthur doesn’t look a day older than he did in London in 2004.

 _Eames, you sent me away,_ he said, like it’s that simple. Like Eames had a choice but to scream like a bull in the ring, when Arthur grabbed him like that, like he had a right, like he didn’t care.

Eames lies back against the wall, imagines it again, his face carved into bones by shadows in the warehouse.

 _So, it’s true,_ he said, too.

And it was.

It  _is._

Eames stares out across the snowy landscape of the third level. He could have said no to Cobb. He could have lied and said he had no idea where to even start with inception.

But creation is such a temptation and he’s an addict, plain and simple. He staves off symptoms easily enough where there’s gin and chips and heat over forty degrees Celsius, but even Mombasa has its limits compared to the trilling threat of dreams.

He gets up, heaving with a kind of anger that reminds him of his father, which is discomfiting and fitfully dark.

He pulls off the mountain gear with stiff, wrenching movements. The sweat freezes in little diamond chips on his skin, along his throat and down the groove of his spine.

He stares at the snow lands that stretch before him like the long walk of the gangplank.

That's when he starts running. He runs barefoot and panting into the merciless sub-zero of the dream.

The black of his blood bursting in his lungs chugs out of him like liquid smoke.

.

.

Eames hides the note in a little pad he hasn’t gotten around to using, yet.

He puts it in one of the bedside cabinets while Arthur is fussing with his hair.

He doesn’t like Kaunas, he thinks to himself. It’s too cold and they don’t even do a decent red wine and all he wants is a bit of fucking sunshine before he bites the dust.

In the bathroom, Arthur hums something indistinct, a pitch too low to be really audible.

Eames grins, grateful and tired.

There are worse things.

.

.

_( _The swirling surf had covered his death, hidden deep in murky darkness his miserable end, as hell opened to receive him._ )_

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from: Rugged and dark, winding among the springs of fire and poison, inaccessible to avarice or pride. ~ Alastor: or the Spirit of Solitude, Percy Bysshe Shelley
> 
> I am part of that part that at first was one, part of the darkness from which light has sprung. ~ Goethe, Faust: Part One
> 
> But a lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness. ~ Daphne Du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel  
> Give a man a mask and he will show you his true face. ~ Oscar Wilde
> 
> No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. ~ F. Scott. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
> 
> The swirling surf had covered his death, hidden deep in murky darkness his miserable end, as hell opened to receive him. ~ Beowulf


End file.
